Fair warning: this diary is nothing more or less than a subversive attempt to cause trouble.
Michael Moore is hanging out in a rec'd diary here today, and he's been much on my mind the last 24 hours, so I thought I'd take a shot at getting his attention. Any help by way of rec's would be appreciated: it's not for me, it's for librarians who are being fired in Illinois.
I work part-time at my local public library, where the following quote from Michael Moore hangs on the wall in one of our work rooms:
"I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.
They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?
The quote is from an interview Michael Moore gave after librarians fought successfully to save his book Stupid White Men when publisher HarperCollins insisted he rewrite it to be less critical of George Bush. The campaign by librarians came unexpectedly and unasked for, and obviously surprised Mr. Moore, but we like to think he's right and that librarians shouldn't be messed with.
To our way of thinking, when you "mess with" librarians, you are messing with the right of citizens to information and there are sadly more ways to suppress information than banning books.
All of which leads to why, when I showed up for work yesterday, I walked into the workroom decorated by Mr. Moore's quote and some Banned Books Week posters to find a clutch of librarians huddled over this article about librarians being quite definitely messed with at a public library in Oak Brook. They're being fired. And they're talking to the Teamsters about unionizing.
I have to admit most people would view our between-shifts huddling over the article as a string of futile meetings. We want to help, but reached no conclusions on how we can, we were just persisting in passing along the information.
But, then again, that's exactly what we do. We routinely, quietly, go about the subversive business of purveying the most powerful substance on Earth: information.
So when I got up this morning, read a facebook string of comments arranging to get a group of people together to go see Capitalism tonight and saw the Michael Moore diary up here, the coincidence of Banned Book Week, Capitalism being released, librarians being fired and attempting to unionize, and me being just one of countless librarians in Illinois who are walking around today mulling over what to do about this, hit me.
Because that's how librarians helped save Stupid White Men. Someone brought the subject of HarperCollins attempt to censor its content up in passing at an ALA conference and librarians just kept passing that information along.
So while I have no idea whether anyone - much less Michael Moore - will ever read this diary, or whether Michael Moore (or anyone else here) can do anything to help protect the dangerous information-purveying trade that is under attack in Oak Brook Illinois, it seemed like there were less productive things I could do this morning than do what librarians do: just keep flinging bits of the powerful stuff we work with around without never knowing which bit of it will end up lighting a fire and starting a revolution.
Eventually, inevitably, some bit takes hold in some mind somewhere and things happen.
So, for what it's worth, here's me, passing along the info. Just what we do.